Is it just me, or are a lot of local bands going in a great direction right now? My Bones and Organs comes to mind. They keep adding slow and heaviness to their set, and I can’t get enough. Well, last Friday we were called in by Brooker to do a surprise show at Rendezvous as part of the POST-grunge PDX-SEA Showcase (or, what I like to call the Showcase Showdown), and Greenriver Thrillers busted out some new material (or new to me) that upgraded their sound to be even more epic sounding. So, it’s great to see things unfolding. I think something’s about to explode.

Also great to hear Mongoloid Village bust out some excellent complicated and creative beats. We were drunken talking about putting something together after the show, so perhaps we could do something in PDX, maybe with Drats or something. We’ll see.

We ended the show with our own rendition of Young Liars by TV on the Radio:

Other random news: We’re putting together some ideas for a video for (We’ll Never Be) Friends 4 Evr. This won’t ever be completed, but when we die in a jet crash then someone should try to find it and complete it and make some money off of it. And Joe has created offspring… and yet he pulls off the impossible black magic trick of continuing to rock. Amazing. Go Joe!

Thanks for coming out, and sorry Lanza for drowning you in my angst driven paranoid rant of nihilist cynacism.

It’s another POST-grunge showcase showdown. Hidden Number will be taking the stage alongside Green River Thrillers and Mongoloid Village from Portland! We’re planning on playing a never before heard song, so you don’t want to miss this one.

I just wanted to get the word out about our buddy Brooker’s podcast for his regular POST-grunge compilation of local Seattle music. In his words:

Listen on your computer or I-pod to 10 songs from POST-grunge II, a compilation of modern rock bands from the Pacific Northwest, released in 2008. This podcast features songs by: Bacchus, Greenriver Thrillers, Hollywood Lightweights, The Keeper, Warning: Danger!, X’s For I’s, Hidden Number, Manos De Plata, Lozen, & Hearseburner.

It’s been a while, but the tempura artichoke hearts just keep calling us back to the Jewel Box Theater. That, and we get to chill with our buds

Smooth Sailing
My Bones and Organs

We’ll be playing a slightly more honed version of our new song, Midnight Beachboy. Josh wrote it, so he can stay in our band.

In other news, we hung out with Brooker (from POST-grunge) last night to celebrate his birthday party, and it’s pretty shocking how large our community of bands, friends, and fans is growing. It’s clear that we need to put together some more compilations, because it’s getting confusing how many side projects we’re all involved in. Is there any kind of compilation you want to see?

Here’s your horoscope: Your day is going to turn out to be a horrific disaster. Just give up now. Come to terms with it. Accept your dismal fate. Knowing this, there’s no way things could get worse so you might as well come out and see us.

We’re bringing bad luck to:

x’s for i’s

The Prick and the Burn

Lozen

Kelly’s Olympian

426 SW Washington

Portland, OR

We’ll be playing a new song, so arrive promptly to see how much bad luck we can heap upon ourselves for your sick amusement. Thanks to POST-grunge for the hookup.

I just wanted to sort of write down an update on our outlook for the year to come. This is sort of stream of conciousness, no holds barred kind of thing. I’ll try to keep it more readable than Courtney Love’s blog posts.

In 2008, we played the most shows ever. Some would argue that we should ride that wave and play more shows in 2009. They would lose the argument. We discussed this long into the night, but came up with the realization that we’ve hit the limit in Seattle. Venues don’t like the average band to play more than twice/month in the same city, and we just tend to play in the same city. And it’s hard for the core fans to come see us every time when we play more. We also want to work hard on our craft. Especially write more songs. You can’t write more songs when you spend a great deal of time preparing for a gig, and we don’t want people to have to listen to the same songs every time. So, one thing we’ll do to balance this out is to try to meet up with everyone in a wider range of venues. Maybe we’ll get more exposure that way. We keep playing at bigger places, so that’s looking good. And we’re going to increase the range of places we play. We play regularly at the Funhouse, the High Dive, the Skylark, and so on, but we’ll expand. We’re playing in Portland regularly now. We also are always looking for other places in driving distance. And we’ve been tossing around the idea of a West Coast tour–oh wait, the economy canceled that. Congress, the President, and the Financial Industrial Complex spoke with us, and we all agreed that it was best if they just bailed themselves out with the money we were going to use for the tour. We came to that agreement, because it was best for everyone involved.

Anyway, now that we’re playing the Seattle circuit regularly, we can focus on the quality of the gigs even more. We don’t want you to be bored. We’re trying out the concept of doing something new and different at every single show, so that we don’t get bored either. If we write a song every month or two, it makes things easier. Plus, stick a cover or two in there, and you can see how things can’t go wrong. Covers are a fickle mistress, though. They’re easy to learn, but they’re hard to execute on. But wrap them up in a snuggly cocoon of Hidden Number gooey goodness, and I think they’ll be smooth enough. And we’re always looking for new bands to play with. But you just can’t go wrong with any band on the POST-grunge compilations. They all kick ass.

Hidden Number practice

We’re half-way done with an album, but like I say give us another 6 months and we should pretty much have it wrapped up in a little silky bow. Dean’s got this wild idea of issuing vinyl singles. There are new songs like Human Error, Friendz 4 Evar!!!1, Fang to Deth, and U R Transparent. We’ve been working on electronic versions of songs, too, and let me say, to quote Josh, they’re like HOT FUDGGGGE. Are you thinking b-side as much as I am? b-side, meaning the brown side, as in the side that contains ALL THE FUDGE!!!1. (Again, I quote Josh) We’re glad Josh brought the magic of FUUUUUDGE.

What else? We’re embracing all that is digital, except for the Moog and theramin. But we’re communicating across the toobs. We’re collaborating on the webz while we toil at our dayjobs, with email titles such as “band practice agenda” and “set list discussion topic argument”. And you can’t go wrong with secret online group accounts, where we post all our lyrics and such ilk, while managing a shared calendar of events. And then there’s the transferring of practice recordings onto USB for day job consumption and recreational analysis.

And the newletters keep broadcasting to the masses. In this age of RSS, a newsletter is pointless, and yet we must not quit. Perhaps it’s our way of aiming a pink beam of information directly and personally to you. So we’ll continue to use the newsletter as our primary method of breaking the latest and greatest news. Let us know if you want to sign up. You’ll be cooking Joe’s latest recipe months before anyone else on your block.

It’s a comforting thought that this post, as will all blog posts, eventually make it to the new century’s digital Library of Alexandria, also known as the Internet Archive to be saved for all time. As information is cached exponentially, how will important works stay findable? How will the signal pierce the noise? Or equally important, how will the specific data that correlates to an inquery be fished from the overwhelming ocean of mostly pointless digressions? At some point in time a source is important, then unimportant, and then important again, as human experience slowly and inevitably nudges the human zeitgeist. The popular form of internet has only been around for around 20 years. Two hundred years from now, will this or Courtney Love’s blog be relevent? Or, like the Library of Alexandria, will all records of human knowledge, including this post, be destroyed by a clash of civilizations?

Anyway, 2009 is going to kick ass. What do you think we should do this year?